June 2016

January 31, 2006

It opens with Steven Seagal, action hero, parasailing. The wind sweeps his competent, action-hero hair. Then, tragedy strikes. Seagal is struck by an errant sea bird. At the exact same instant, a bolt of freak lightening strikes them both, producing a sizzling, unnatural, really rather unpleasant sound. The result: a freak of nature, a manbird, is born. A creature with the fierce determination and lethality of the soldier of fortune and the poetic attributes of a dated Richard Bach allegory about a bird who wanted only to follow his dreams. That creature was named: JONATHAN LIVINGSTON SEAGAL! Beautiful yet capable of pushing a bad guy's nose through his left ear with a single jab, poetic yet prone to swooping down to eat garbage on the beach, Jonathan Livingston Seagal must stop... somebody. We haven't gotten that far with the script yet. But believe us, this is our ticket to Hollywood. This is going to be bigger than Mike & Ike: The Movie, our aborted script starring Michael Douglas and Ike Turner as fruity candies trying to stop an evil Triad that is running dope through San Francisco's Chinatown.

Are commonly blamed for the excesses of China's Cultural Revolution. The most famous of these excesses was the Gang's monstrous decision to force the entire country to subsist on a starvation diet of bland country rock. All across China, peasants were required to listen to albums by the Eagles, Linda Ronstadt, Jackson Browne, Andrew Gold (and many other lesser criminals, asocials, and sessions musicians), or face the dreaded "Death by Firefall." The insipid sounds of these bands are generally blamed for the millions of deaths that occurred during the period that the ponytailed and blue jean clad cabal held sway over Mao Zedong, who is said to have preferred the harder "southern rock" stylings of Lynyrd Skynyrd, Molly Hatchet, and even the Dixie Dregs. Following the death of Mao, the Gang of Four (or Turquoise Triad, as they were sometimes called) were arrested and tried. This brought an end to the country's "Great Leap Mellowards", although not before the 1979 Christopher Cross Plague brought untold additional sufferings to the afflicted Chinese people.

Is right here. Why, we have half a mind to... but no matter. They'll get theirs. Someday a drifter is going to ride into their little town and paint it red. Then they're all going to be like the old lady at the end of Flannery O'Connor's "A Good Man Is Hard to Find." Yessirree. They're all going to be mooning and saying, "Oh, I know you're not a bad man, Mr. Peanut, not really!" And what's he going to do? He's going to shoot them down. Shoot them down and then say, "She's a been a good woman if Mr. Peanut had been there to shoot her every minute of her life."

Unfortunately, we know of no such bucolic spot in Littlestown or its environs. Believe us, if it existed, we would have smoked pot by it, and we have never smoked pot in this enchanting glade with its view of a tantalizingly blue lake. Ergo, this scene must have been a figment of the artist's imagination. Man, he must have had him some good weed.

What is it that makes postal workers sort their personal problems into neat piles of dead coworkers? In any event, the seven dead in today's shooting isn't bad. It's almost certainly a personal best for the unnamed female shooter. It's not up there with the Oklahoma employee who postbagged fifteen, but hey, that's Oklahoma. It's so boring there, people hang around the post office hoping to get shot.

Come on, who's fooling who here? They're not our troops! If they were our troops, they'd be down the street conquering a 7-11! Liberating us some Ding Dongs! But they're not, are they? No, they're off in Iraq, doing the bidding of Ding and Dong! Well, we say fuck Ding and Dong! We want us some old school Ding Dongs! And if our troops aren't going to kill for them, well, they're not our troops, are they? Are they??